The Family Romance

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Poet, critic, teacher, intellectual, Eli Mandel is a genial and anguished human being loved by all who know him. The anguish derives from a committed response to all the terror and frustration of the contemporary intellectual world, from the legacy of Auschwitz and Dachau to the supposed breakdown of humanistic modernism. The Family Romance provides a representative sampling of Mandel’s writings, expressing his troubled conscience and equally troubled consciousness.

Though he is without question a man who thinks deeply, Mandel has no notably original ideas. He is adept, however, at applying the insights of other (generally foreign) thinkers to the Canadian situation. One article begins typically: “In the Preface to the translation of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak cites Jean Hippolite’s essay on the Preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind.” Mandel is nothing if not eclectic; he brings, one suspects, whatever he has just been reading to the subject at hand. He thrives on paradoxes, problems, difficulties, dilemmas. All these he finds troubling but stimulating. One sometimes wonders whether, if such difficulties did not exist, he might be impelled to invent them. It is this agitated, magpie-like mind that unites discussions as various as large intellectual matters like “History and Literature” and “Modernism and Impossibility” with discussions of Canadian writers ranging from George Grant, Northrop Frye, and Hugh MacLennan to Leonard Cohen, Frank Davey, and Christopher Dewdney.

Nonetheless, while this book needs to be read by anyone seriously interested in the Canadian intellectual scene, I confess to finding it somewhat disappointing. I expected a continuing argument; what we have instead is a collection of articles and reviews, all of which (with apparently one exception) have appeared before. These are good to have between two covers, but, as Mandel admits in an endearing introduction which concentrates on the book’s deficiencies, the result is somewhat choppy and repetitious. Though there has been some revision in the reprinted essays, errors remain, notably the statements that Grove, who died in 1948, wrote to McLennan in 1971, and that The Watch That Ends the Night (1959) appeared in the same year as The Master of the Mill (1944)!

There is much that is worthwhile here, and Mandel is always worth reading. At the same time, The Family Romance is the ideal title for an important critical book that Eli Mandel has not written.